teachers, and his own fidelity to the great truths which they are trampling underfoot.
The key-note of the Science of Lunacy is struck in certain organizations which a physician once described to me as "the physical temperament of insanity with a brain impossible to overset." To Abraham, for instance, came weird impulses of reversion to savage customs and a nomad life. In a weak man without faith these would have developed into savagery and homicidal mania. A resolute personal will would have trampled them out, and by doing so injured both intellectual and moral development. But Abraham knew them for what they were—revelations of the Unity Who is guiding Humanity. He followed them in cautious reverence; and was led by them, not towards uselessness or crime, but into higher truth. No action becomes absolutely sinful except in so far as it is the result of lack of faith in the Unity. Abraham discovered that sympathetic comprehension of the savagery of the past leads, up the spiral of ascent, towards comprehension of the future destinies of Man. He did not kill his son; he made of him the Founder of a Race.[1]
In the next Chapter, I shall point out how use may be made of nervous disorder (where it unfortunately exists) for the development of Art. But a great deal of insanity and crime might be prevented if the custom prevailed of periodically casting off the conventions of civilization, and reverently reverting to the piety of our savage fore-fathers, who sought religious Truth direct from Nature, and found it without scholastic and literary appliances. Till we do this, we shall surely find madness an inevitable feature of civilization.
- ↑ See Appendix.
